Page 79 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“What about Sneed?” I ask, teasing.
“He’ll arrive with blueprints and moral arguments and a cake,” Rayek says without hesitation. “He’ll tsk at the kettle and approve the windows and pretend he doesn’t like the view.”
“And Mama?”
“She’ll cry in the doorway and bully the furniture into better decisions,” he says, gentler now. “Your father will smoke a cigar on the cliff and pretend he isn’t doing it.”
“And CynJyn?”
“She will dance on the roof in her socks and scold the aurora,” he says, solemn as a saint. “Kaspian will claim to be researching wind-shear patterns and bring a picnic.”
I laugh, full-bodied and unlovely, and it feels like prayer.
When the first pale wash of pre-dawn starts bleeding at the edges of the dome—the shy gray that comes before color—we pull the cloak up and lie close, paying attention to breathing because it’s free and we can. He tilts the telescope just enough that the rings slide into view, a bright scar across the dark. I sit up, straddling him, and peer through the eyepiece like a kid. The ice shines like a promise. A little gasp slips out of me; I can’t help it. He laughs quietly, pleased with himself, with me, with the way light works.
“I keep thinking I should feel guilty,” I confess, still looking, my voice small because the sky is right there. “For how easy this feels when yesterday was a battlefield.”
“We did hard things to earn easy,” he says. “And we will again. But tonight, we let easy sit down.”
I abandon the telescope and fold back into him, cheek on his shoulder, hand over his heart, ring cool and then warming. “You ever think about how stupidly lucky we are?” I ask.
“Often,” he says. “Usually when you’re making that face you make when you’re about to do something that requires witnesses.”
“I do no such thing,” I protest, then relent. “Okay, I do exactly that.”
“Try to remember to invite me,” he says, amused. “It’s more fun up close.”
We kiss again, sweet and slow, a punctuation mark that doesn’t end the sentence so much as promise a paragraph. My body hums, low and content, like a good engine when it’s doing exactly what it was built for. The ring catches a thread of dawn and flicks it back at the sky. Somewhere below us, the kitchen clatters into day; the house shakes off sleep and starts rehearsing being a home for a new story. The observatory holds us through the shift without complaint, as if this is what it hoped for allalong when it let a foolish girl and a patient giant use it as a refuge.
We do not race the sun. We let it find us. The light spreads across the rug and spills over our feet, warm as a hand on a fevered brow. The stars don’t go anywhere; they just choose to be less obvious for a while. I kiss him once more, gratitude and greed in equal measure, and feel him smile into my mouth.
“Stay,” I whisper, a habit I don’t need anymore that still likes to be said.
“Always,” he says, a word that fits him better than any uniform, and I believe him because I’ve watched him keep worse promises.
We don’t chase sleep so much as slide into it, curled around each other like we learned in the shuttle, like we practiced on the cliff, like we wrote in ink tonight. The last thing I know is the sound of his breathing falling into step with mine and the soft, smug contentment of a room that knows a secret and will keep it.
This isn’t a finale. Nothing explodes. No curtain drops. It’s the feeling of walking through your own front door, of dust motes in sunlight, of a kettle that lies and then finally boils. It’s a homecoming with my name on the deed and his hand on the knob.
It’sus.
CHAPTER 20
RAYEK
Time passes the way the river does when it remembers the sea—not fast, not slow, just sure. The lemon trees keep doing their noisy breathing. The basil in the kitchen court keeps trying to be a forest. The house stops acting like a museum and learns to be a home.
I sit on the warm stone lip of the fountain in the south garden and watch the two most dangerous people I know try to outmaneuver a butterfly.
Star is barefoot, dress hitched in one hand, red curls loose because the day decided it didn’t want to pin anything down. Our little one zigzags over the grass ahead of her, a tumble of knees and decision, shrieking with a joy that makes the birds shut up to listen. Sunlight turns her hair to copper fire every time she turns; when she looks back to make sure her mother is still chasing, her eyes flash gold like mine and something under my ribs that used to be a wound decides to be an altar instead.
“Get back here, you thief!” Star calls, laughing, pretending the butterfly is evidence in a very serious trial. Our daughter screams in outrage and delight, curls bouncing, feet slapping the path, a smear of crushed clover on her heel.
“I’ll protect you!” I shout in the voice I used to save for orders, and the girl veers toward me like gravity. She doesn’t stop so much as reorient; I scoop her up mid-flight and spin her until the lemon trees smear into a yellow ribbon and her giggles turn into gasps.
“Again!” she demands, palms on my cheeks as if I might forget whose face belongs to her.
“Demanding,” I tell her, breathless and obedient. “You get that from your mother.”
